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Why Do You Want to Do That?

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Do you ever ask yourself…Why do you want to do that?

Bet you do.

This  afternoon that question crossed my my mind. It followed a twisting path to get there, but eventually it arrived, and I guess it brought a little enlightenment with it.

My friend and fellow editor, Tina, lives in a kind of extended family commune. Her relatives and SO think, often (from what I can tell) about how kewl it would be to acquire a good-sized chunk of land and build a compound on it, one with separate living a quarters for each individual or dyad or triad or whateverad, but with a community hall where people might meet and prepare meals together and party together and plan their shared trajectory together.

Meanwhile another pair of friends, La Maya and La Bethulia, occasionally voice the same thought: how amazing would it be to find a way to get a group of like-minded people together in a kind of shared housing?

And gazing into the past, some other old friends of mine — a couple and a single woman — came amazingly close to throwing in together with me to buy a gorgeously tricked-out triplex in Fountain Hills, a far suburb of Phoenix gifted with peace, quiet, gorgeous views, relatively cool temperatures, and proximity to the upscale environs of north Scottsdale. Fortunately, we couldn’t figure out the legalities of a tiny co-op — I say “fortunately” because we fell out and went our three different ways. But still…as ideas go, it was interesting.

So this thought proceeded to an e-mail to La Tina: why not look and see if those of us who can support ourselves remotely, through the various gigs and online businesses we exploit, could purchase some ash-covered acreage in Yarnell and build our own compound on it? The Yarnellites no longer welcome trailers, but…what about modular homes? I could, for example, live real happily in this little fella, especially if it had some room for a private garden or two around it.

And as I was shooting those links off to her, there it was, the thought occurring: Why do you want to do that?

Me?

Well, I don’t think I’m going to live all that much longer. And I suspect the time left to me is not going to lend itself to fully independent living.

I can’t take care of my house anymore. If this back pain doesn’t go away, and go away damned soon, I’m not going to be able to live here in my home. I can barely vacuum the floor, much less mop the grime off it. I haven’t dusted in weeks. It’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed in the morning, stumble around for a few hours, and then drag myself back into the bed, there to sleep all afternoon.

After I discovered that the blood pressure med is known to cause a) rashes like the nasty number that broke out on my face right after I started it, b) fatigue and listlessness, c) joint and muscular pain defining the excruciating agony that ramped up within three weeks after I started swallowing the stuff, and d) dizzy spells that make it dangerous (read “almost impossible”) for me to drive, I decided to experiment by quitting it. After all, I’ve had high blood pressure for several years and am not going to die in a month or two.

The rash went away within five days after I stopped taking the drug. So did the dizziness and light-headedness. Three weeks after quitting the damn stuff, the back pain is down to a .25 on a scale of one to ten. And the blood pressure is up to 130 to 140 on the home monitor, which means it’s over 150 on the higher quality units at a doctor’s office.

So I risk a stroke or I make myself so sick taking the damn stuff that I can’t take care of myself anymore and would just as soon shuffle off this mortal coil at the earliest possible moment.

That reduces the choices, de facto, to either

a) I get rid of Cassie, sell my home, and move into a life-care community where there’s someone to watch out for me, fix my food, and do the light housekeeping; or

b) I take my chances with death or permanent godawful disability.

But suppose the choices included c) I throw in with a bunch of other people who can more or less take care of themselves but can’t (or would prefer not to) go it completely alone? Now we have a whole new take on why do you want to do that…

Why would I want to live in a commune in Yarnell? Not just “it’s quiet,” “there are no effing cop and nooz helicopters buzzing the house every ten minutes,” “the air is clean(er),” “hawks and eagles and buzzards ride the cold columns of air overhead,” “the weather is never blinding effing hot,” “you can sleep with the windows open at night,” “you can hear the coyotes call in the middle of the night,” “there are no pawnshops for gangbangers and meth-heads to stick up,” “there are no cops to chase the gangbangers and meth-heads into your garage,” or any of that claptrap.

Put all the claptrap together and then add to it “my life might be shorter, but at least a fair amount of the last part of it will be better.”

Now you’ve got the picture. What is that you want to do, and why do you want to do that?

 

 

Real Books Don’t Disappear…

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Salesman_demonstrating_Nook_tablet_in_a_Barnes_&_Noble_bookstoreHere’s something to entertain you, here in our Brave New World: with some question about the survival of Barnes & Noble, loyal B&N customers are beginning to wonder what will become of their Nook e-books if the company goes kaput?

Barnes & Noble has already deep-sixed the color version of the Nook, and some observers think, along with technology expert Jeff Kagan, that “the Nook may become the Betamax of e-books.”

Huh. Think of that.

Therein lies the reason this old troglodyte clings to her wallsful of real, paper-and-ink analogue books. Unless it’s a PDF that you’ve bought and downloaded into your computer and backed up externally, these  e-book things are ephemeral, and you “own” them at someone else’s pleasure. Barnes & Noble selleth and Barnes & Noble taketh away. Ditto Amazon.

A hard-copy book can be eaten by crickets or printed on acidic paper that rots away… but by and large, once it’s bought, paid for, and parked on your bookshelf, no one can barge into your house and grab it away from you.

In the virtual world, however, Amazon can and does do exactly that, as we’ve known since 2009 when it yanked George Orwell’s 1984 off the Kindles of customers who had already paid for it and begun to read it. In 2012, Amazon deleted over 4,000 e-books when one of the largest distributors in the country declined to accept a change in terms of service, and then a little later that year it remotely wiped a customer’s Kindle, “accidentally” revealing that it can erase purchased and paid-for ebooks at will.

And because you don’t own those books at all — you own a license to look at them — all those hundreds and thousands of dollars worth property cannot be passed down to your heirs. If your whole collection of learning and knowledge exists in the form of e-books, you have no right to give them to your children and grandchildren.

Now, it has to be said that about 99.8% of published books could be disappeared without harming the course of humanity’s intellectual progress. But… The potential for censorship — we could call that thought control — is obvious.

And IMHO the potential for thought control already looms way too large in our electronified culture. This morning a member of our business group gave a presentation on the pervasive electronic surveillance the government has slapped on the entire country and probably on most of the rest of the world — how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and why it’s way too late to for anyone to do anything about it. It’s scary stuff.

Those of us who blithely fork over our privacy and our rights to corporations and secretive government agencies assume too much in imagining that these entities will always be benign.

So far, though, it’s not too late to buy a real book. Preferably with cash. 😉

Image: Selling the Nook. Tomwsulcer. Public Domain. Photographer warrants identifiable subject has consented to publication of image.

 

One Good Thing to Eat: Gorgeous Mujadara Lentils

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Having fallen off the Diet Wagon three times today and never managed to climb onto the Exercise Wagon at all, I’m feeling generally fat and cranky again. However, the day was partially saved by a bowl of a wonderful veggie dish I stumbled upon, by recipe and by improv.

A week or so ago, I came across a New York Times recipe for something called mujadara, a kind of Lebanese comfort food made with lentils dosed copiously with cumin and oniony stuff. Times food writer Melissa Clark describes the dish as made with leeks and flavored with (among other things) allspice and bay leaf. Having none of these things on hand, I made a few substitutions. She also calls for 2¼ teaspoons of salt, about twice as much as anyone should be adding to their food. There’s a reason for that: lentils and rice call out, piteously, for salt. But lo! there’s a very tasty fix for that, too.

Check it out:

You need:

• 1 cup green or brown lentils (not the orangey ones)
• 1 large onion, sliced thin
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• dash of salt
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup rice
• 1½ to 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves (more, if desired)
• leaves of a small sprig of rosemary, finely chopped
• dash of cayenne or red pepper flakes, to taste
• 1 cinnamon stick
• a couple of fistfuls of spring greens (chard, kale, spinach, mustard, or combination), chopped
• water
• 13.5-ounce can of coconut milk
• fresh lemon (optional)

Place the lentils in a large bowl and cover generously with warm tap water. Allow to soak while you prepare other ingredients.

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or large, deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until they turn deep golden brown, about 10 or 15 minutes. You want these to get pretty dark, with a few strands maybe even turning black. To accomplish this without burning the onion, the heat should be on the high side of medium but not too hot.

When you decide these are done, lift about half of the onions out of the pan to a plate or bowl and set aside.

Stir the garlic into the pot with the remaining onion and cook briefly, until fragrant. Then stir in the raw rice and sauté for a few minutes, until the grains turn opaque and begin to toast. Stir in the cumin, clove, and cayenne; sauté for another few seconds.

Drain the lentils and stir them into the pot. Add 4¼ cups water, the rosemary, and the cinnamon stick, and bring the liquid to a simmer. Cover and cook over low heat for 15 minutes.

At this point, take a taste. Add about half the can of coconut milk; gently mix this in and taste again. Add a dash or two of salt, if desired, and then add a little more coconut milk to taste. For a little more zing, squeeze the juice of half a fresh lemon into the pot and stir. Cover and allow to cook another couple of minutes.

Rinse the greens and chop them finely. Spread the greens over the top of the rice and lentils. Cover and cook another five minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand, covered, for another five minutes.

Serve the mujadara sprinkled with the reserved toasted onions.

Incredibly good to eat. The coconut milk adds a lovely mellow flavor that, especially with a spritz of lemon juice, obviates the need for a lot of salt.

 

Thinnening Thoughts…

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Over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal has succeeded in losing 12 pounds in 10 weeks, in spite of a vacation in San Antonio. w00t!

So that’s encouraging. It shows what can be done, even with the occasional lapse. Before I came across Crystal’s post, I’d been reflecting on the whole weight loss experience. So far, I’ve lost 15.4 pounds since May 13, with 5.9 more to go. Hope to be down to 135 pounds by the end of August…actually, the target is slightly less than that, since I figure once I quit trying to lose weight, a few pounds will probably come back.

CardioDoc, that lithe old boy, remarked that you can’t lose weight unless you’re slightly hungry all the time.

Well. That’s just not my style. I’m too self-indulgent to go around hungry and cranky all the time. And it doesn’t appear to be true — I’m rarely hungry but, except for a week or ten days on the “plateau,” I’ve been losing weight steadily.

But one thing has become apparent: if you go to bed just slightly hungry, you do wake up a few ounces or a pound lighter. It’s not a matter of trying to sleep while you’re ravenous — just going to bed on a lightly packed stomach.

I think that means that you should eat your larger meals earlier in the day — at breakfast or lunch. Since I’ve been occupying myself most mornings with exercise (walking, until I went lame; now swimming or doing physical therapy exercises), I haven’t really felt like eating a lot in the morning. But by early afternoon I’m ready for a real meal…so that’s when I’ve been eating dinner, including a glass of wine. Today it was a gorgeous curry with chicken and lots of veggies…not too tacky.

Swimming seems to burn at least as many calories as walking. It only takes about 35 minutes to swim 30 or 33 laps of the pool in the backyard — about a half-mile. By contrast, the 3½-mile march around the park consumed about an hour and fifteen minutes. And now that I’ve fallen off the “plateau,” I’m losing weight as fast as I was with the walking.

Even at dawn and sunset, it’s hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. It was 112 when I climbed into the pool around 7 o’clock this evening. The water is now so warm that after about 15 laps, just when I’m getting on a roll (uhm…on a row?), I can feel my face getting red. I actually get overheated in the water! It’s like swimming in a bathtub.

But so far, I no longer look like a pregnant grandmother. My shorts are falling off. The jeans aren’t–but they’re made of a stretchy fabric, and besides, they were too tight to begin with. Now I don’t have to lay down on the bed or the floor to zip up the damn things.

The blood pressure is still under control at 107/66, despite my having abandoned the irbesartan several days ago. The little home blood pressure monitor runs about 6 or 8 points lower than the one in the doctor’s office, so the real systolic measure is probably around 113 to 115. However, the irbesartan’s effect on blood pressure persists for at least two weeks after you quit taking it. But…however x 2: it was never this low while I was on the drug.

So this brings us to the Big Question: Once you reach the target weight, how do you stop losing weight but not gain it back????

Obviously, the number one trick will be to work daily exercise into the fabric of my life. And if the back and hip pain don’t stop before the weather gets cold, that’s going to be a trick. Really, I can barely walk. Right now the hikes are flat out of the question, which is fine while it’s 95 at dawn and 112 at sunset. But when the pool is too cold for swimming…then what?

My friends gave me a perfectly fine bicycle, which I suppose I’ll have to start using. Problem is, I don’t think it’s very safe. You can’t get from point A to point B without having to navigate traffic. And Phoenix is decidedly not a bike-friendly city. Some of those crazies out there will swerve at you, cut you off, and behave as though they’re deliberately trying to hit you. Even wearing a helmet, with nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of jeans between you and the pavement, you run quite the risk of serious injury.

There are few things I dislike more than gyms. As the odd kid out, I grew up hating gym and the general miseries associated with coping with mean brats and air-headed PE teachers. Gives me the creeps to go into those places. No way am I gonna pay for the privilege of using unsanitary equipment in a place that would give me the willies even if it weren’t populated with lithe young narcissists. Yuck!

Nor am I at all interested in decorating my house with treadmills and stationary bikes.

Soooo…if I can’t walk by October, it looks like the only choice will be bicycling. Guess I’ll need to buy a better helmet.

20 Excuses to Cheat on the Diet

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Stupid Reasons:

1. It’s only a little pasta.

2. I swam 50 laps yesterday. That’s almost a mile. Or so.

3. Don’t you think losing 1.7 pounds overnight is a bit much? Maybe we should put the brakes on this dieting phenomenon for a day or so.

4. On other days when I’ve fallen off the Diet Wagon, nothing has happened. In fact, after I ate the lamb souvlaki pita and the deliciously greasy French fries sprinkled liberally with feta cheese, the weight went down 1.2 pounds.

5. I can’t face another bowl of baked eggplant. 😛

6. It’s a hideous hot, cloudy, steamy day that’s so miserable the air is clammy even indoors where the AC is blasting away. This calls out for comfort food.

7. It would be a shame to let all those beautiful, sweet  Campari-type tomatoes go to waste. They call out to be made into comfort food.

8. I can’t face another plateful of cabbage salad. Or any other kind of salad. :mrgreen:

9. It’s so hot in here that Cassie can barely bring herself to harass the Human with Ball. She needs a piece of limp spaghetti to cheer her up.

10. M’hijito has gone incommunicado and will not answer requests to help his crippled mom haul a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets back to the house from Costco. This calls for comfort food.

11. The ongoing PITA hurts so much I can’t even contemplate dragging through a regular grocery store, to say nothing of limping almost to the back of a gigantic Costco. That also cries out for comfort food.

12. Harvey broke last night and today ran up a $70 repair bill.

13. That comes a day after the $100+ tab for cleaning out the DE filter, which in this ungodly heat must have damn near kilt the service dude.

14. An unplanned $170 in pool bills leaves too little money to buy a year’s worth of pool  tablets from Costco, anyway.

Real Reasons

15. On top of their usual round of headaches and the days of not knowing whether the house in Yarnell is still standing, La Maya and La Bethulia have both come down with a nasty bug. Other people’s misery should be acknowledged and honored with comfort food.

16. Half of beloved Yarnell has been reduced to piles of ashes. Many homeowners there were uninsured. It remains to be seen how much, if any, of the town will be rebuilt.

17. Nineteen fine young men were lost to the pile of ashes. In making the loss of half the town seem insignificant, this also makes the event infinitely worse.

18. No one seems to know when the residents there will be able to return to their property. Water and power are out; the water situation was described by a Yavapai County Sheriff’s deputy as “extremely bad,” and cleanup crews want to replace all the propane tanks, any one of which may be a continuing hazard.

19. The climate change some of our craven leaders would like to ignore and of which the current ten-year-long drought is just one manifestation pretty well guarantees that over the next few decades most of the West’s forestland will die off and burn away. Some of the most magnificent country on the planet is becoming unlivable.

20. It is way too late to do anything about this. Such things render the choice between spaghetti and cabbage salad irrelevant.

 

Shoulda Been a Christian Scientist

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My great-grandmother, the one who lived to the age of 94 without ever seeing a doctor because it was agin’ her principles, may have been right.

You’ll recall, maybe, that for the past two or three weeks I’ve been so crippled with back pain I’ve barely been able to crawl out of bed. Don’t think I mentioned the facial rash that itches like the dickens or the gut-tossing moments of wooziness.

The pain and rash started to ramp up just about two weeks after I started the blood pressure med CardioDoc  prescribed. By June 16 I could barely move around the house, certainly couldn’t do any weight-loss exercises, and really should not have been driving the car, since moving my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal took real, concentrated, agonizing effort. And if I got a dizzy spell while I was behind the wheel, I became an instant menace on the road.

Meanwhile, I’ve dropped about 13 pounds. The weight and BMI are now well within the “normal” range for a woman my height.

CardioDoc remarked that once I hit the target weight — another 8 or 9 pounds to go — I may be able to get off the irbesartan (the unpronounceable generic name of the drug he has me on).

Well. The pain got so bad I made an appointment with the Mayo to find out whether Young Dr. Kildare’s speculation that I need a hip replacement is correct. And then I started to make a few connections. Every time some quack wants to put me on meds for the rest of my life, I try to tell him that if a drug has a bizarre side effect, I’m gonna get it. And every time, they go “uh huh, uh huh, yes dearie.” And every time, yup: whatever wacko reaction has about a 1% incidence, that’s what happens to me.

Sooooo…. I started to look this chemical up.

And lo! We have all of these apposite phenomena:

• Muscle cramps or spasms
• Muscle pain or stiffness
• Joint pain
• Bone pain
• Sleepiness or unusual drowsiness
• Unusual tiredness or weakness
• Hives or welts
• Cracked, dry, scaly skin
• Itching
• Dizziness, faintness, or lightheadedness when getting up from lying or sitting position
• Pain or discomfort in the arms, jaw, back, or neck

Huh. Think of that. More to the point, think of all those.

Well. I have to say, I do appreciate the “sleepiness or unusual drowsiness.” I’ve been sleeping like a hibernating mama bear ever since I swallowed the first of these pills. I sleep all night, and then I sleep again all day. Since chronic insomnia is a hallmark of my personality, this is a refreshing change.

However, all the rest of the phenomena come under the heading of “the cure is worse than the ailment.” Interestingly, a four-year trial following more than 4100 people with heart disease showed no improvement in survival outcomes.

I was going to experiment with tapering off this drug as soon as I hit the target weight. But once I found all those side effects, each one of which exactly describes one happening or another (occasionally I’ve been so dizzy I’ve thought I was going  pass out, and at some of those hypochondriacs’ forums on the Web, irbesartan users have described the back pain and the facial rash to a T), I decided to accelerate the experiment.

Three days ago, I stopped taking the drug.

The facial rash has already subsided. Last night, after several hours of frolicking in the pool with M’hijito and Charley the Golden Retriever, the back pain was just frickin’ excruciating. But this morning it was down to a “3” on the famous pain scale of 1 to 10, ten being something worse than death. It has been hovering around 8.

The dizziness and faintness are gone.

The blood pressure?  Measured at 5:00 p.m. each day:

July 2: 116/67
July 3: 113/73
July 4: 107/72!!!!

That last, after swimming 30 laps and slurping down a fruit frappé.

Irbesartan has no rebound effect. But it takes quite a while, apparently, for the drug to work its way out of one’s system. Test subjects who had eight weeks of exposure still showed about two-thirds of the drug’s antihypertensive effect a week after quitting. I’ve been swallowing the stuff for a little over a month, and so presumably, the allegedly “normal” blood pressure readings over the past few days represent the lingering effect of the stuff.  We shall see what the readings look like in another week or three.

But for the nonce, it looks a great deal like this is another instance of pharmaceutical overkill. I should have been asked to get the fat off before being put on a drug, any drug. Just this moment I feel a lot better than I have over the past few weeks. The pain is down to about a .75 or 1 on the infamous 1-to-10 scale. I’m not really up for walking three and a half miles, but if the pain doesn’t flare again, I certainly will be very soon. Actually, if it weren’t hotter than the hubs of Hades out there and soggy enough to rain, I could easily bicycle the desired three miles.

Well, it’s only 105, but humidity is at 38%. If there’s no lightning at sunset, I’ll try for another 30 laps in the pool — that’s almost a half-mile of swimming.

Evidently, Great-Grandma and her equally devout daughter, my great-aunt, were onto something. Holy mackerel.